


Praying

by aeli_kindara



Series: Supernatural Codas [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s13e09 The Bad Place, Gen, M/M, Post-Episode: s13e09 The Bad Place, Praying to Castiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 09:52:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12956691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: Castiel doesn't realize Dean's been praying to him until he stops.Coda to Episode 13.09: The Bad Place.





	Praying

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, this is entirely Natalie's fault.

Castiel knows in an instant that something is wrong.

He’s been feeling off-kilter for hours, sick and more miserable even than his imprisonment usually accounts for. Lucifer’s taunting through the bars doesn’t help, of course. Nor does the fact that they haven’t seen anyone but their wide-eyed jailor, the demon Drexel, in days.

Still, there’s something else: a dark, dull, metal-on-bone feeling that settled in his chest sometime this afternoon and hasn’t budged. He sits against the wall, watches his hands, considers the way his ankles jut out of his pant cuffs, and wonders, as he sometimes does, what Jimmy Novak would have wanted to do with this body, had he ever had the chance.

It’s just one of those moods, he tells himself. The ones that strike him sometimes, and scrape across the insides of his ribs for a while, until they don’t again. It always makes him feel weak and useless, that he can’t just will them into nonexistence. That for hours or days or weeks he just aimlessly wishes he could feel better, and wishes for Dean.

That last is what shames him most. A weakness; another way he fails. He once feared that it meant a new Naomi was controlling him somehow, tugging on whatever strings are still attached in his infernal contraption of a mind, trying to send him after his friend. But Dean’s presence usually eases the feeling rather than intensifying it; never yet has one of those moods turned into a violent impulse or an act he can’t control. With time, he’s learned to accept them, and to let them run their course.

No — the mood is not what’s wrong. What’s wrong is when the mood winks out.

Castiel sits bolt upright. _“Dean,”_ he says.

Lucifer is watching him through the bars of his cell, eyebrows raised. “Wet dream?” he inquires.

But Cas is too unsettled to even spare him an irritated glare. “Something’s wrong with Dean,” he says.

“Yeah?” He wishes Lucifer would stop watching him like that, smugly and infuriatingly unconcerned. “He send up a little prayer, hm?”

And that’s when it clicks. When his agitation and uncertainty dissolve into a horrifying, heart-stopping clarity. When Castiel understands — not just today, not just this moment, but _everything._

“No,” he says. “He _didn’t.”_

\---

This has happened before. 

It was a few days after his return. A strange few days — the Empty spit him out a mere fifteen miles from where he’d died, and he’d returned to the scene, unable to help himself. His own wingprints were still there, scuffed and dusty, beginning to wash away in the rain. So were the remains of a pyre. No body to return to. No sign of Sam, Dean, Mary. No Jack.

In Castiel’s brain buzzed a horrifying pit of wrongness.

He longed for Dean — longed so much he felt sick with it. The nearest pay phone, the nearest hot-wire-able car. Mad driving through the night, a stolen transmission sticking and juddering in rebellion, a halfway truck stop, a familiar engine’s rumble, an embrace. He _wanted_ it badly enough to set his teeth on edge, brain on fire, loathed himself with the wanting, and that’s what gave him pause.

Maybe he had come back wrong. Missing something, or else, carrying something he shouldn’t be. Maybe that creature — Cosmic Entity, whatever — had somehow hitched a ride.

Maybe he was a danger to Dean. Maybe Dean didn’t want him around at all.

So Castiel didn’t call. He traveled in stops and starts: eight hours on a Greyhound bus, six sitting at a picnic table by a dusty highway doubting his entire self. Three on a train, ten in a trucker’s cab, telling awkward stories to hold up his end of the arrangement and growing more and more self-conscious all the time. Two in a Wyoming bathroom, body rebelling against him and against the needless junk food pressed on him by his last ride, more miserably ill than he’d ever felt in his life. One in a stolen car, pressing toward ninety, a hundred, then fifteen minutes shivering in a ditch and staring at the wreck of his own making before the distant wail of sirens sent him stumbling away.

He’d meant to walk to the next highway, or another spot on this one, far enough away to avoid questions. Once out in the stars, though, away from the thrum of the interstate, he felt the silence and emptiness like balm on his aching soul. Somewhere over the next ridge, coyotes howled. Castiel sank onto a misshapen boulder, hugged his knees to his chest, and allowed himself to feel nothing at all.

How long he sat there, he couldn’t say. He just knows that then — suddenly — the miserable longing dropped away as though it had never been.

He hadn’t banished it, after all, just frozen over a pane of ice to bear his weight above its abyss. But now — it was simply _gone._ Castiel lurched to his feet, nearly turning a numb ankle on a stone. The coyotes were still singing, the moon still low and yellow; nothing had changed. Except in him.

The desolation weighing on every cell of his body was gone. Urgency surged within him, leaping to fill its place — urgency, and fear. _Where’s Dean?_

It lasted two minutes. Two minutes, before the weight settled back within him, sighing its way home. By then, though, Cas was running. Sprinting. Barreling back toward the highway, toward the nearest car that could bear him onward, toward Lebanon, toward home.

He didn’t stop. Not until he found a driver — a startled middle-aged rancher whose F-150 nearly ran him over when Castiel leaped out into his headlight beams. Not until that driver dropped him off, looking unsettled and relieved, with a handful of spare quarters, just a few towns from home. Not until that payphone. Not until Dean’s voice crackled over the receiver and the weight inside him began, as if by a long-deferred miracle, to finally, fractionally ease.

\---

Castiel — angel of Thursday, one-time would-be deity, spanner in the works, reviled by heaven, fallen in every way imaginable, saved by the love of the Winchesters — is the world’s greatest fool.

He has known many fools, in his long life. More often than not, he ranks the Winchesters high among them. Their sheer stubbornness, their self-sacrificing idiocy, has made him angry in ways no multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent should even be capable of. And yet, here he is, the most oblivious of them all.

Dean has been praying to him all along.

Two minutes, Sam told him, in that hushed conversation one evening in the bunker; two minutes and ten seconds, maybe more, when his brother was dead. He had a glassy, disbelieving look about him as he said it: a man who doesn’t know where to put his aborted grief. And still — _and still —_ Castiel failed to understand.

That beat of longing inside him is sometimes a pounding chord of fury, helplessness, dread. Other times, it’s a fizzing hum; a birdsong. There are days when he wraps himself in the warmth of it, basks in its glow without knowing why. Somehow, he’s never put the pieces together.

Dean has been praying to him all along.

And now, suddenly, he is not.

\---

Castiel closes his eyes. He breathes in, out, and unfurls all the tattered grace that’s left within him. He raises it, a brave and battered flag.

And he sends out a prayer of his own.

\---

Lucifer breathes, “You didn’t.”

Castiel opens his eyes. “I did.”

For a moment, Lucifer just stares, a smile spreading slow across his face. Then, without looking away, he says: “Drexel.”

The demon doesn’t answer, but Castiel can practically hear his nervous swallow.

“In a few minutes,” Lucifer says, “all the angels of Heaven will descend on this place, believing that you and your current — _master_ — have found and captured my son, and are imprisoning him in these very cells. As if you could.” His eyes flash. “They will further believe that Castiel here has revealed this in an attempt to win back his place among them. When they discover his deception, they will be…” He smiles, wolfish. “ _Very_ displeased.”

Drexel takes a step back from the bars, eyes wide with horror. “I —”

“It’ll be a slaughterhouse, really,” Lucifer adds, stretching lazily. “No demon will stand a chance against them. Unless…” He looks up, face a mockery of surprise. “Unless that demon is accompanied by angels, I suppose.”

Castiel could argue. Could point out that Drexel need only free _him,_ and not Lucifer. He doesn’t. That’s a battle for another day.

Drexel’s hands shake. The key clatters in the lock.

They are free.

\---

The moment his door swings open, Castiel has Drexel by the throat.

“Our blades,” he says.

Drexel gulps hard against his hand. “Asmodeus’s office,” he gasps.

“Is he there?”

Drexel shakes his head frantically.

“Take us to it,” Castiel commands, and releases him.

They move quickly and quietly down the corridors, and still the roaring absence pounds in Castiel’s skull. A world without Dean Winchester seems suddenly an immense, cold, terrifying thing. _Come back,_ he prays. _Come back, come back. Dean. Dean. Come back._

It doesn’t work, of course.

Their blades are on a shelf by Asmodeus’s desk, along with Castiel’s phone. He’s dialing as they dart down the corridor once more, ignoring Lucifer’s hissed reprimand. Dean doesn’t answer; they race up a flight of stairs. In the distance, there is shouting, a clang of metal on metal. Castiel dials Sam.

The phone is ringing when they step around the corner and meet their first angel. Lucifer plunges his blade into her heart.

“Pick up, Sam, please, pick up,” Castiel mutters. Lucifer spares him a disgusted glance before whirling to face the next enemy. Another circles him and flies for Castiel. One-handed, he blocks, blocks, disarms, thrusts. The angel flares and dies, and it occurs to Cas that he knew him.

No matter. Sam doesn’t answer. Castiel kills the angel fighting Lucifer, and they break for the stairs.

 _Jack,_ Castiel thinks with all his might. _JACK!_

Nothing. No one.

He doesn’t remember how they make it out. They do; that’s all he knows, all of them bloody and panting, and Castiel glances about for the nearest car. It’s got the smell of angels on it, doors hanging open, and keys still dangling from the ignition.

“Cas,” says Lucifer. “Cassie, wait, where are you —”

He reaches for the door, and nearly loses his fingers when Castiel slams it shut. Castiel cranks the key and jams the car into reverse. His tires squeal. He doesn’t look back.

It doesn’t matter what’s happened to Dean. Castiel raised him from hell; wherever he is, he will come for him. He will kill a thousand angels for their graces, if he has to. He will cross worlds. He will never stop hunting. He will find Dean, even in the Empty itself. And when he does — when he gets Dean back — he will tell him how stupid they both have been, and how long.

Castiel clenches his fist on the wheel. He chokes down the howling absence in his chest. He turns the car toward Kansas.

And he drives.


End file.
